[Part Six: Update]
STEP 1 UPDATES
1. More evidence of the link between the World card and the Triumph of Eternity:
In the Tarots Enluminés exhibition, one wall showed a large reproduction of the following Florentine painting of Petrarch's Triumps of Fame, Time, and Eternity, by Francesco Pesellino ca. 1450:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Petr ... ernity.JPG
Two of the four evangelical creatures can be seen in the celestial spheres above the heavenly "new world" of Eternity. The other two are not visible, presumably because they occupy the other two "corners" of the world and are therefore on the lower half of the celestial spheres, beyond the frame of the picture.
As far as I am aware, the evangelical creatures do not normally appear like this in depictions of the world and the celestial spheres, so I presume this is inspired directly by the Book of Revelation, which is the main biblical source for the four creatures and also a major source for the content of Petrarch's Triumph of Eternity poem. The four creatures appear in Revelation chapter 4, which describes God enthroned in majesty, receiving honor and worship from the four of them and from 24 enthroned elders; this scene is the main inspiration for the upper half of the early Florentine illustrations of this Triumph.
I admit that my knowledge of late medieval and early Renaissance depictions of the Ptolemaic world is limited; perhaps there were some depictions of our earthly world which also showed the four evangelists? But I have not yet seen any, so I am assuming for the moment that they have been added here because it is not our earthly world being depicted, but rather the eternal new world after the Last Judgment.
The obvious connection to the tarot World card is the four evangelical creatures on the Tarot de Marseille card, the earliest form of which is the World card found in the Castello Sforzesco, which probably dates to around 1600. This is, of course, too late to be directly connected to the Petrarchan Trionfi illustrations of mid-15th century Florence. But the four creatures also appear around the Ptolemaic world on the highest card in the S series of the "Tarocchi di Mantegna," the card called Prima Causa. The Tarocchi di Mantegna, especially in its S-series version, appears to have been partly based on trump cards from a tarot deck, most likely in Ferrara in the 1470s. This suggests that there was version of the World card in Ferrara at this time which depicted the four evangelical creatures around the world.
I think this is yet another piece of evidence that the Ferrarese retained an understanding of the World card as the "new world" of Petrarch's Triumph of Eternity for quite a long time, much longer than in probably all other regions of Italy (which came to see it solely as our earthly world). The other evidence of this long-lasting Petrarchan understanding is as follows:
- The alternative name of "Dio Padre" (God the Father) given to the card in the Steele Sermon, which suggests either that some early Ferrarese designs of the card actually depicted God enthroned above the world just as in the early Florentine Trionfi illustrations, or, at the very least, the Ferrarese had such a clear association of the card with the Triumph of Eternity that they understood the figure on the card (whatever it was: an allegorical lady or an angel) to represent God's sovereignty.
- The Ferrarese promotion of Justice to the second-highest position in the trump order, between the Angel card (as the Last Judgment card was always called in Italy) and the World card. I believe this shows a keen understanding of the original Petrarchan meanings of the Angel and World: Justice is obviously being used here to signify the Last Judgment itself, while the Angel is interpreted only as calling the souls to that final judgment. That is indeed what the Angel card nearly always depicted: one or two angels blowing a trumpet to raise the dead from their graves. Apart from the highly unusual Visconti Sforza card, which shows God with the sword of justice, it never depicts the event of judgment itself. The Ferrarese used Justice to represent that event. And that, in turn, emphasizes the meaning of the following World card as the heavenly world of Eternity, for those judged worthy of it.
So this appears to be further evidence that the World card initially represented the eternal world of heaven in Petrarch's Triumph of Eternity, and that the Ferrarese remained aware of that for a remarkably long time. In my hypothesis, this long-lasting awareness is readily explained by the Ferrarese (or at least some of the Ferrarese, including the Este court) continuing to play the 14-trump Petrarchan version of Trionfi up until at least 1457.
Nevertheless, the Mantegna S-series "Prima Causa" image suggests that the Ferrarese understanding of the card may have shifted by that time: The World card was apparently still associated with God just as it is in the Steele Sermon (which must have been roughly contemporary with the S-series) because God was the "Prima Causa." But the card must have now been seen as representing this world, not the next: It is this world to which the Prima Causa is relevant, not the next world. In other words, God's association with the World card seems to have become perceived as being cosmological instead of eschatological.
2. The likely ranking of the cardinal virtues in the 14-trump Petrarchan deck supports a Florentine origin for the 22-trump deck:
In the hypothetical 14-trump Petrarchan deck, the lowest card would presumably have been Love, not only because it is the first Triumph, but also because it matches the position of Cupid in Marziano's Sixteen Heroes game. It is also very unlikely that Love would have been permitted to triumph over any of the virtues. At the same time, it seems very unlikely that any of the cardinal virtues could have outranked Chastity, because in Petrarch's poem cycle, the virtues are Chastity's entourage—her foot-soldiers (
Armate eran con lei tutte le sue chiare Virtuti).
The virtues named in the Chastity poem do not include any of the traditional seven, but they are quite similar in nature to the four cardinal virtues, especially
Perseveranza, Modestia, Senno, Accorgimento (Perseverance, Moderation, Prudent Judgment, Foresight).
So, I think we can assume that the four cardinal virtues must have been clustered together between Love and Chastity, just as the three theological virtues would have been clustered between Time and Last Judgment (as already discussed in Part Two above).
This positioning of the cardinal virtues matches the Type A order used in Florence, where the three cardinal virtues were grouped together, probably between Love and the Chariot in the earliest sequence. As I said above in footnote 2 of Part Four, if that was the original sequence of the 22-trump game, we would have to assume that the 22-trump game originated in Florence, and went from there to Milan, where the order was modified before continuing on from Milan to Ferrara.
I think Fortitude was probably the highest of the cardinal virtues originally, as it seems the one most closely aligned to Petrarch's rather martial description of Chastity as a strong fighter overcoming the powers of Love. This matches my reconstruction of the order of the virtues in the earliest standard deck in the footnote cited above.
STEP 3 UPDATE
Another reason for the choice of the Tower as the card to bridge the conceptual gap between the Devil and the Star:
Something I overlooked in my earlier discussion is that the Tower, which appears to have been called the Lightning Bolt originally (
la Saetta), works well from two perspectives. Not only is it appropriate from the perspective of the Devil, in the sense of God's wrathful power striking down evil, but it also works from the perspective of the Star, Moon, and Sun as a fourth celestial "light," lesser than the other three and therefore lower in rank. I am sure that this particular point has already been made by others, but I don't remember exactly who.
So the card simultaneously had both a religious meaning and a cosmological meaning within the trump hierarchy, depending on which side you viewed it from. This would explain why it was called the Lightning Bolt and not something like the Wrath of God. All in all, it was a truly ingenious solution to the challenge of finding something appropriate to place between the Devil and the Star.